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Foer was born in 1977 in Washington, D.C., the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer and president of the American Antitrust Institute, and Esther Safran Foer, a child of Holocaust survivors born in Poland, who is now the director and CEO of the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.[1] Foer is the middle son in this Jewish family; his older brother, Franklin, is a former editor of The New Republic and his younger brother, Joshua, is a freelance journalist. Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years", during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."[1]

Foer attended Georgetown Day School and in 1994 traveled to Israel with other North American Jewish teenagers in a program sponsored by Bronfman youth fellowships.[2] In 1995, while a freshman at Princeton University, he took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates,[3] who took an interest in his writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy".[4] Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that."[4] Oates served as the advisor to Foer's senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran. For his thesis, Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.[citation needed]

In 2005, Foer wrote the libretto for an opera titled Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence, which premiered at the Berlin State Opera on September 14, 2005.[11] In 2006 he recorded the narration for the documentary If This is Kosher..., an exposé of the kosher certification process that advocates Jewish vegetarianism.[12]

In May 2012 Foer signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown. His fourth novel, Escape From Children's Hospital, was due for publication in 2014.[15] It is to be "a fictionalised account of when an explosion in a summer camp science class left Safran Foer’s best friend without skin on his face or hands, leaving the author unscathed by inches."[15]

He has been an occasional vegetarian since the age of 10,[16] and in 2006 he recorded the narration for the documentary If This is Kosher..., an exposé of the kosher certification process that advocates Jewish vegetarianism.[12] In his childhood, teen, and college years, he called himself vegetarian but still often ate meat. Foer's first book of non-fiction, Eating Animals, was published on November 2, 2009.[17] He said that he had long been "uncertain about how I felt [about eating meat]" and that the birth of his first child inspired "an urgency because I would have to make decisions on his behalf".[16][dead link]

In June 2004, Foer married writer Nicole Krauss. They lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, and have two children.[16] The couple separated amicably in 2014 and now live in different homes elsewhere in Brooklyn, in close proximity to one another.[18]

He is an avid coffee drinker, and gets up daily at 4:00 to start to write.[19]

Foer is viewed by some as a polarizing figure in modern literature, due to his frequent use of modernist literary devices. Harry Siegel of the New York Press, titled an article on Foer "Extremely Cloying and Incredibly False", highlighting the flaws in his style: "Foer is supposed to be our new Philip Roth, though his fortune-cookie syllogisms and pointless illustrations and typographical tricks don't at all match up to or much resemble Roth even at his most inane."[20]Huffington Post contributor Anis Shivani included him in his list of the fifteen most overrated modern American writers.[21]